1. Field of Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate generally to devices and methods for cooling electronic equipment. Specifically, aspects of the invention relate to methods of preventing water carryover from a cooling device to the electronic equipment.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Heat produced by electronic equipment can have adverse effects on the performance, reliability and useful life of the equipment. Over the years, as electronic equipment becomes faster, smaller, and more power consuming, such equipment also produces more heat, making control of heat critical to reliable operation.
A typical environment where heat control may be critical includes a data center containing racks of electronic equipment, such as servers and CPUs. As demand for processing power has increased, data centers have increased in size so that a typical data center may now contain hundreds of such racks. Furthermore, as the size of electronic equipment has decreased, the amount of electronic equipment in each rack and power consumption of the equipment has increased. An exemplary industry standard rack is approximately six to six-and-a-half feet high, by about twenty-four inches wide, and about forty inches deep. Such a rack is commonly referred to as a “nineteen inch” rack, as defined by the Electronics Industries Association's EIA-310-D standard.
To address the heat generated by electronic equipment, such as the rack-mounted electronic equipment of a modern data center, air cooling devices have been used to provide a flow of cool air to the electronic equipment. In the data center environment, such cooling devices may be referred to as computer room air conditioner (“CRAC”) units. These CRAC units intake warm air from the data center and output cooler air into the data center. The temperature of air taken in and output by such CRAC units may vary depending on the cooling needs and arrangement of a data center. In general, such CRAC units intake room temperature air at about 72 to 95° F. and discharge cooler air at below about 60 to 71° F.
The electronic equipment in a typical rack is cooled as the cool air is drawn into the rack and over the equipment. The air is heated by this process and exhausted out of the rack. Data centers may be arranged in various configurations depending on the purposes of the data center. Some configurations include a room-oriented configuration in which cool air is output in general to the data center room. Other configurations include a row-oriented configuration in which CRAC units and equipment racks are arranged to produce hot and cold air aisles. Still other configurations include a rack-oriented configuration in which each rack has a dedicated CRAC unit.